Quotes About Contrast

Il n'y a pas une idée qui ne porte en elle sa réfutation possible, un mot, le mot contraire.

the fine binding of his volume of Balzac I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comédie Humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted to the same topic: "Either one thing or the other, a tiny miniature like the Curé de Tours and the Femme abandonnée, or one of the great frescoes like the series of Illusions perdues. What! You've never read Illusions perdues?

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

What I found in a city—when I finally saw a real one—was disquieting. Nothing matched. It was a weird assemblage of things, but there was beauty in the oddness of it, and the thought that it was all man's doing. But

Every morning you slunk out of our house after breakfast, leaving behind the books and the smell of coffee....and like a spy going deep undercover into enemy territory, you entered a world that was a terrible inversion of everything I had taught you to value: a world shaped by toughness, boastful ignorance, firm gender stereotypes, underachievement, and the threat of violence.

I had to admit, my little Accord hadn't looked all that great next to the Benzes and Rolls in that garage to begin with, but now that it'd been turned into a mobile tribute to the artistic rendering of Lil' Loco, it stuck out like a Cracker Jack ring in a a Tiffany display.

It's been said that only the very rich understand the difference between themselves and the poor, and only the truly brilliant understand the difference between themselves and the relatively dumb. Well, only men who have gone through

The lobby was at once attractive and bleak, a place meant to impress without creating the desire to linger.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. —Robert Frost

A gunfight in a graveyard, Jesus Christ.

It had been a surprise—and yeah, okay, a pleasure—to realize how very good he was at being bad.

Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight.

The problem with the best moment in your life is that every other moment is worse

Something else: it always struck me as troubling that the words in books are printed in black and white, when life is anything but. The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn't work like that.

try thinking the same thing by darkness and see how different if feels.

I was tall and biracial and sexy. But then there was Winnie. Her blond hair fell straight like a pane of glass. This was who my Jewish babysitter wanted?

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?... Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test.

Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.

Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.

There are no descriptions, it is almost needless to say, of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis playing with kittens.

I stepped inside the front hall and kicked off my snow boots. I slammed the door behind me, making the dark ruby and emerald glass shake in the small leaded panes. I slid purposely on the hall rug, causing it to bunch and crinkle on the slippery polished oak of the floor.

Doris is very religious. She says it is a comfort. Her minister is plump and pink, and if he met John the Baptist in tatters in the desert, stuffing dead locusts into that parched mouth for food, and blazing the New Kingdom out of those terrible eyesockets, he would faint. But so would I, likely.

It's so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.